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Supreme Court is Interested in Illegal Downloading of Songs

The Supreme Court doesn't have to hear appeals. It can pick only those it wants to rule on -- which is just a small percentage of the cases before it. As a result, when one side appeals, the other side doesn't always respond. If that happens, however, and the Court is seriously interested in the case, it will ask the other side to speak up. This just occurred in a copyright infringement case involving the illegal file-sharing of music over the Internet, Harper v . Maverick, reports The Blog of the Legal Times.

College student Whitney Harper was found guilty at trial of illegally file-sharing 37 songs when she was in high school, an activity that would have triggered a minimum penalty of $27,750 ($750/song) unless she was an "innocent infringer" -- unaware that the music she was downloading was copyright protected. In that case, her penalty would be reduced to $7,400. The trial court ruled that she might indeed have been an innocent infringer, and a trial was needed to be sure.